Three of my colleagues here at Monfort are Israeli demo-scene alumni
(specifically, Borzom / Tatoo, Scroll-Lock and Crunch / YOE). We got word of an
IGDAIsraeli Chapter meeting that was going to
take place in a day, where demo-sceners are expected to attend (Civax /
Moonhunters is the IGDA organizer in Israel), so we quickly rang up everyone we
still have contact with (the last scene event in Israel was in 2000...), took a
car and went there.

It was great! More than great, it was absolutely brilliant. Fewer sceners
attended than I expected/hoped, but the ones that did come were pretty much the
core of the Israeli scene to begin with. Borzom, Scroll-Lock and I arrived in
the Leo Blooms Irish pub in Tel-Aviv a little after 19:00 to meet up with Kombat
/ Immortals and Jonny / YOE who were already there, and were shortly joined
by Civax and One / Moonhunters, Crunch / YOE and after a little while Protopad /
BSP (my brother Mickey), Dark Spirit / TTOM, Hex / ULC^Tatoo and Rage /
Immortals.

From left to right: Jonny,
Crunch, Borzom, Scroll-Lock, Holograph (myself), Civax and Kombat in the
bottom

Over the course of about five hours we sat around, drank and ate all sorts of
shit and had loads of fun talking to people none of us have seen in years. The
results were sometimes disturbing:

What. the.
fuck.

All in all, it was an absolute blast, and I'm now planning a demoscene
get-together (which will hopefully include a BBQ and demos displayed constantly
on a projector) sometime towards the end of July. If you're a demoscener and
have any inclination to attend, get
in touch...

Update: Oran put up pictures from the event on his Giant Mitzy site. You can download them here.

I also got around for an hour or so of Resurrection of Evil; unfortunately I was left less than satisfied. The Grabber weapon is more useful than Half-Life 2's
Gravity Gun, but also far less interesting or cool. The physics engine
is adequate, but nothing like HL2's Havoc engine, which also detracts
from the weapon's cool factor; the whole thing just basically feels
like a ripoff of HL2 (which is something id Software should not feel
compelled to do). I'll give it a fresh attempt tomorrow.

Finally, of note is the Classic Doom 3 project, which is sort of a must-have for any Doom fan.

I'm generally fascinated by the effects of nuclear bombs. It's not the
technology I'm interested in as much as the aftermath; the images from
the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, along with the stories and related
social phenomena (Godzilla is just a trivial example) hold an
irresistible sway over me.

After spending about 20 minutes reading through George Weller's rediscovered report
of Japan's nuclear aftermath it was really, very difficult lifting my
jaw off the floor. It's an astonishing read, particularly because it
combines the early 20th century technical ignorance regarding nuclear
weaponry and its various effects with surprising candour and lack of
naivette. I was a little concerned with the reliability of the
publication, but I suppose having it reported on CNN and subsequently slashdotted lends it at least some credibility.

At any rate if you have any interest in the post-apocalyptic, you
owe it to yourself to read the report. That said, you also owe it to
yourself to play Fallout. Sleep tight.

Brian Moriarty (creator of Loom) speaks! Besides explaining how Loom was originally meant to be a trilogy, he adds an insight on the reason its sequels never came out:

Contrary to popular belief, the LOOM sequels were not abandoned
because LOOM didn't sell well. LOOM has sold more than half a
million copies in various formats since it was published in 1990.
The reason the sequels weren't made is because I decided I wanted
to work on other things, and nobody else wanted to do them, either.

As a huge fan of Loom I'm not sure which saddens me more: the
original theory that Loom did not sell well (aside from being an
astoundingly good game, Loom had an Israeli version - in native Hebrew
no less! - and sold extremely well here), or the fact that the trilogy
was simply... neglected.

Another interesting bit of trivia: a Japenese re-arrangement of the soundtrack was made but never released. Moriarty sold one of the only existing copies on eBay last April. I contacted the buyer and hope to get the music available on the internet.

Last but not least, you know you've played way too much Loom when
not only do you recognize the source of the following passage, but you
can actually hear Cygna's voice in your head when you read it:

Destiny shall draw the Lightning
Down from Heaven; roll its Thunder
Far across the Sea, to where I
Wait upon the Shore of Wonder
On the Day the Sky is oepened,
And the Tree is split asunder.

I somehow managed to miss the release of The Ur-Quan Masters
alpha 0.4. Just so you understand, alpha 0.3 was quite stable and I was
able to complete a game successfully. Alpha 0.4 is even more stable and
adds some more features (PC intro/ending sequences, "triscan" filter to
name two). It is the best free PC game you will ever play.

Also, the Precursors' remix project
contains some pretty kick-ass remixes and covers of the various SC2
tunes. I've made an addon for Ur-Quan Masters which contains what I
perceive as the best version for each tune; I'll post a link when I can
find some web-space for that (the package currently weighs in at about
90mb) - alternatively I'll do some reading about the new trackerless
BitTorrent and see if I can use it instead.

One thing I do wish UQM had is the ability to select a tune at
random from a selection (for example, there are two or three very good
versions of the Thraddash theme I would like to be able to put in the
remix pack). I'll see if I can file a feature requests or maybe even
add it to the source code myself.

Slava, one of my colleagues, asked me to help him out on a strange
issue: he's integrating an old 2D vector engine (written in C++/MFC)
into a new .NET 1.1 WinForms application. The vector engine exposes an
API through a native DLL export, along with a bunch of structures. The
issue was with unmarshalling one of the native structures: everything
seemed to be unmarshalling correctly except for the double values (we got things like 2.53e-250 - uuh, not likely).

Slava's already managed to consume the same DLL successfully from
Delphi, and upon reviewing the two we couldn't find any difference.
What we managed to miss at first was that the Delphi marshalled
structure was declared with a {$a-} prefix, which means "ignore alignment" - otherwise Delphi might assume that the structure might be in some way memory-aligned.

Figuring that our .NET woes might be due to the same issue, a quick look around MSDN revealed to us that the StructLayoutAttribute(LayoutKind.Sequential) declaration also relied on the "pack"
member of the same class, which "controls the alignment of data fields
of a class or structure in memory." My logical conclusion as a
programmer would be that creating a sequential structure would default
to a straighforward memory representation - i.e. no alignment - but
apparently it's misguided; .NET defaults to 8-byte alignment for
managed structures. We set the alignment size to 4 and voila - problem
solved.

This only goes to prove that even the simplest and subtlest of
programming challenges can baffle even experienced developers, and both
Slava and I wasted quite a bit of time on this issue. The moral? There
isn't one, really; just expect to be baffled now and then no matter
what you've seen or been through.

It took me ages to understand the fundamentals of internationalization,
(man-) language interoperability etc. In fact, only after working on
MFC software over a year I encountered a problem so fundamentally
accute I couldn't for the life of me figure it out, and it took a
bitchslap from my friend Ilya (Konstantinov) to make me halt and figure
the problem out properly.

Internationalization is hard. Perhaps its hardest aspect is
support for the various languages; each language has its own character
set, and although most widely-used languages derive from the basic
latin alphabet there are still subtle differences. German makes
extensive use of accented characters (é and ü for example); Czech makes
use of the relatively unknown caron (č) and that's just the tip of the
iceberg. Imagine the thoroughly different requirements of Arabic and
Hebrew: complex script languages that are not only written
right-to-left, but employ a completely seperate alphabet with different
requirements. For example, did you know there are two ways to write
several letters in the Hebrew alphabet, depending on their location
(middle or end of a word), but those versions of the same letter have
the same semanthics? Or maybe you've run into the latin letter Eth (Ð),
which to my knowledge only exists today in Icelandic?

Finally, to the point: if you've ever received an e-mail with
question marks instead of words, entered a website in your native
language but got gibberish instead or perhaps (for the more astute)
wondered how it is possible to display text from so many different
languages on one document (web site...), you're not alone. Most
programmers are completely unaware of these fundamental issues, and
cause massive headaches to users and fellow programmers alike. I've
come across an article Joel Spolsky wrote
back in 2003 with an absurdly long name; no matter: finally someone
(certainly with more credability than myself) has taken it upon himself
to write a thorough introduction to the subject for people - developers
in particular, but the technically savvy among you might also be
entertained - who do not realize its importance. Please, pleaseplease go and read it before you go on with your daily lives.

Eric Lippert
has an incredibly interesting five-part blogpost about the mathematical
essence of musical theory, along with some pretty nifty demonstrations.
I've dabbled a little in the more practical applications of musical
theory before (writing wave and module players and some basic software
synths) but honestly have never been really interested in its
mathematical/physical aspects.

I've been developing Exchange and Outlook-centric applications for the
last 4 years or so, and now I can tell you that I have absolutely no
nerve endings in my forehead as a result (try bashing your head against
the table, keyboard or wall repeatedly for four or so years and you'll
see what I mean).

Developing applications for Outlook is an impossibly frustrating
task; from the lackluster documentation (MAPI documentation is scarce,
not to mention obfuscated and outdated) to unexpected behaviour
(Outlook COM API shutdown events never occur) to missing features in
high-level APIs (CDO is missing a lot of functionality, and Extended
MAPI can only be used from C++ code) to depracated critical features
(the password parameter for CDO.Session.Login is ignored outright). All
that if you readily ignore proper bugs (CDO session logoff taking
between 30 and 180 seconds, instead of - say - 0.02), COM Threading
Apartment issues (CDO can only be used from STA threads - say goodbye
to convenient remoting or web services) and the ghastly Outlook Object
Model guard which made creating an entirely new Extended MAPI wrapper necessary to write the simplest code even for secure enterprises. Are you getting my drift here?

I distinctly recall doing some Outlook add-in work for a guy on Rent A Coder; what was originally intended as an Outlook add-in template on which the guy can build his own code turned into a fully-fledged commercial application, because the buyer simply could not afford to learn Outlook/MAPI basics.
The good news for me was that the years of suffering resulted in my
becoming something of an Exchange/Outlook expert and that this kind of
knowledge pays very well indeed; the bad news are that it's literally
impossible to do an Outlook project without reducing your life
expectancy considerably (all you cardiologists must be really damn
pleased about that).

Anyways I just read that according to Eric Carter I must despair no more!
Apparently the new VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) 2005,
currently in beta, includes a proper managed API for Outlook. Hurray!
Huzzah! Finally Microsoft delivers something for Outlook/Exchange
programmers that might not utterly suck. Break out the champagne, everyone - our torment is over!

NOT. Unfortunately the managed API for Exchange is nowhere in sight
(mind you, I've been promised an alpha version by a Microsoft premier
representative back in September 2003 or so), and Exchange/MAPI
programming is still a major hassle (what with the Exchange OleDB
provider not functioning under ADO.NET, CDO being STA-only requiring
workarounds, WebDAV being slow and often times irrelevant if Custom
Forms are used, TNEF specs few and far between etc.) All in all I'd
still rather choke than write an Exchange-based service. Fortunately it
still pays well enough for me to afford a guy sitting behind me
constantly, ready to invoke the Heimlich maneuver at any given moment.

Do you recall that classic picture of the back of a girl? I recall
seeing that picture demonstrating the graphic prowess of generations of
computers and video cards (from the earlier Macs, through a friend's
286/VGA machine and the first true color-capable PGA video card another
friend used to own). Ilya sent me a link detailing the original story. Interesting, if you're a history buff like me.

This (Hebrew only) news post only goes to show that stupidity knows no bounds.

While not American, I find the very concept of a senate intelligence committee voting on expanding an already-problematic Patriot Act extremely disturbing. What really yanks my chain, though, was that the vote was held during a secret meeting,
to which members of the press were barred entry. Does anyone else
consider the very concept of legislation in secret anti-democratic in
the extreme?

I came across an amusing definition of a particular class of bugs, dubbed heisenbugs. I think I'll start using the term.

Finally, it appears we have an Aibo here at work! The damn thing is really disturbing. Photos and experiences to come (as soon as I get my ass off the chair long enough).